Mr. Ronan Boyle:

I will address the points the Co-Chairman made in sequence. On methane and manure, the 54% reduction is coming from methane which is stored in manure as opposed to enteric methane from the animal.

The Co-Chairman asked if funding is in place to support private companies for research and development in technology such as this. Outside of Enterprise Ireland or local LEADER funding that private enterprises may avail of, I am not aware of any Irish funding we can tap into to support this. Our investments have been significant in recent years, both in Ireland and across Europe, including in the Netherlands where we have spent ten years working on environmental projects around rubber flooring in particular. That has all been self-funded by Easyfix.

From an environmental and sustainability point of view, the Co-Chairman referred to water courses, soil health, etc. The big advantage we would see with slurry technology systems is that they will allow farmers to better manage their slurry on-farm because the absence of technology on the farm makes the management of manure much more difficult. I probably need to explain the difficulties farmers face. If a tank is full of manure, it needs to be agitated to be spread. In order to agitate it a full tank is needed and Irish tanks are typically about 8 ft deep. When that is agitated there is a window of three days before it starts to return to a solid state so farmers are under time pressure to extract the slurry at that time and spread it on the land. Therefore, sometimes land gets a little more than it technically should get. With the use of a slurry technology system, slurry is effectively available on tap. Trevor Crowley is probably the ultimate example in that he has a dairy farm and runs a paddock system for his cows. His cows go in and graze out of paddock and he follows them with slurry. He probably puts out slurry two or three times per week so he is able to use it in the correct application rate and follow his cows, as opposed to applying chemical fertiliser. He is able to use the slurry on his terms, not on the basis of having it agitated and having to empty the tank. It is about the management of the slurry in that respect.

There is another important scientific point. The manure that is being applied to the land that has been treated in a system like Easyfix is an aerobic product, as opposed to an anaerobic product which is untreated. That has a whole host of implications for soil health and what happens thereafter on the land. Worm counts and so on are all linked to that. I hope that answers the Co-Chairman's question.